Process vs Thread

Process

• unit of allocation
• typically independent, and carry considerable state information
• have separate address spaces
• inter-process communication is expensive
• each process has one or more threads
• one process cannot corrupt another process

Thread

• unit of execution
• typically share the state information of a single process, and share memory and other resources directly
• context switching between threads in the same process is typically faster than context switching between processes
• inter-thread communication cheap
• each thread belong to one process
• one thread can write the memory used by another thread